


four times ando saved hiro (and one time he didn't)

by meretricula



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: 5 Things, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:12:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meretricula/pseuds/meretricula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ando-kun isn't cut out to be anyone's savior. (Season One)</p>
            </blockquote>





	four times ando saved hiro (and one time he didn't)

1.

During the first week of work no one really wants to talk to Hiro. Everyone knows who his father is but if he's down among the drones like the rest of them there must be _something_ wrong with him, and anyways Hiro is entirely too cheerful and exuberant and _not Japanese at all_ and it might, Kami-sama forbid, rub off on someone.

Ando thinks Hiro looks sad behind his big smile, and he's obviously completely lost in his cubicle, has no idea what he should be doing because his immediate bosses never quite dare to give the big boss' son something so imperative as a _deadline_ or, you know, actual work, so he just sits there and plays Solitaire all day and he's never even watching porn, which, if _Ando_ had a work-computer and nothing to do with it, would be the major pastime of the day. Finally he goes over during lunch and they exchange cards, and as it turns out, Hiro is a whole year and two months older than Ando.

So he calls Hiro "Hiro-san" and Hiro calls Ando "Ando-kun," but until the day he dies Ando can't believe that Hiro could possibly be older when he's such a _kid_.

 

2.

One night while they're out drinking and singing karaoke (Ando sings terribly and only when he's too drunk to remember it the next morning, but Hiro has a nice voice and only needs to be slightly buzzed before he's bouncing up and down in front of the microphone, slurring out vaguely phonetic versions of English lyrics. He never has any idea what he's actually singing, and Ando usually picks the songs) Ando is listening to Hiro completely mangle Britney Spears' _Oops I Did It Again_ and grinning like a tipsy fiend when a bleached-blond comes up to Hiro and starts, well, petting him.

"You're so cute," she purrs, "and you sing really nicely."

Hiro beams at her and thanks her profusely. Ando wishes he could blame his friend's total obliviousness on the alcohol, but Hiro really hasn't had all that much and to tell the truth, he's just like that all the time. Hiro and the blond get through two duets and three rounds of drinks before Ando resigns himself to his fate and pulls Hiro aside.

"Here. You'll need this," he says, pressing a condom into Hiro's hand. Hiro stares at it blankly.

"Ando-kun, what is this?"

Which is how Ando ends up giving Hiro the sex-talk, complete with bells and whistles and kind of rambling, because Ando was involved in those three rounds, too, in the slightly unsanitary bathroom of a karaoke bar. Hiro blinks as the light dawns - the light always dawns visibly for Hiro, maybe because it doesn't happen very often - and says, "Oh, like the videos you watch at work!"

"Um. Yes. Sort of," Ando says, because the blond's top doesn't leave much to the imagination and he doesn't want Hiro to walk into this with the expectation that her breasts will live up to the glorious example of his porn.

"But I don't want to be that kind of friends with Keiko-chan," Hiro protests.

"Keiko-chan? Who is Keiko-chan?"

Hiro looks at him like _he's_ the one being slow. "Keiko-chan, karaoke-girl!"

Ando covers his face with his hands. Only Hiro would get the bleach-blond karaoke girl's _name_ and still not want to sleep with her. "Okay, who _do_ you want to be that kind of friends with?" he asks, not quite despairing.

Hiro thinks about it for a minute. "Ando-kun!" he replies cheerfully. "I think we would be very good friends."

Ando lets out the breath he didn't realize he was holding in between his name and Hiro's explanation, and thanks all of his ancestral spirits that Hiro just _doesn't get it_ sometimes.

 

3.

Hiro brings Ando over to dinner once. His father barely speaks to Ando and not at all to Hiro, and Ando begins to understand how remarkable it is that Hiro can be the sweet, ridiculous idiot that he is, growing in a house like this. Hiro's sister keeps the meal from being a complete disaster by making polite conversation with Ando, nice weather, hear we're going to have rain tomorrow, stock market babble that mostly goes over Ando's head (Hiro's sister is freakishly smart, he notices, and wonders if maybe she ate all of the genius genes when she was a baby and made Hiro into the lovable moron he is. Ando isn't sure if he'd be angry or grateful if his theory were correct) but he smiles and nods in all the right places.

Right when dinner is ending and they're getting ready to leave, Hiro's father turns to Ando and abruptly asks him how Hiro is doing at work. "Uh, fine," Ando stammers, uncomfortable. "He, um, really helped me out with a problem I was having the other day." It isn't a lie. He just isn't mentioning the part where his problem was not seeing that the six of clubs could go on the seven of hearts and free up the last ace. Hiro's gotten really good at Solitaire lately, since all he can do at work is practice.

Hiro's father gives him a sharp look, but he leaves it alone. As Hiro walks Ando out - their apartments are sort of in the same direction - he says, "Your sister is really hot."

Ando doesn't really like Hiro's sister; he likes blonds American women with big breasts (and Hiro's smile, wide and bright and guileless, he doesn't think), but it makes Hiro laugh and his eyes crinkle up behind his glasses in the warm, happy way they didn't all dinner long, so Ando refuses to regret any of the questionable truths he has told that night.

 

4.

After Charlie, trying and trying and trying to save her, and finding out that there are some things his powers can't fix, all Hiro wants is to lie down and rest for a while. Well, really what he wants is for Charlie to be alive, to talk to him with her funny American accent and her perfect phrases of Japanese, and for his powers to still work, and on really really bad days for everything that's happened to have been a dream, so he can wake up and tell Ando about it at work even as it fades from his memory. But failing all that, he'll settle for a futon, someone's spare couch, even a clean space of gutter to lie down in and let the world go away for a little while.

Then he walks back into the diner, and Ando's right there, waiting for him, where he left him. Hiro has never been so relieved to see anyone in his life, and in that moment he loves Ando more than ever, because even though he knows it's not Charlie's fault, it's Hiro's fault, or even no one's, at least Ando didn't _leave_ him.

 

5.

After the explosion, Hiro is sitting quietly, too shell-shocked to really move or talk or interact in any sane fashion with civilization, and he thinks, Ando would know how to make me feel better. But of course Ando can't, because Ando is dead, which is why he needs to feel better in the first place, it's a conundrum, can't be solved.

Hiro starts to laugh, not the happy laugh that used to make Ando smile in response and tell Hiro that his eyes were crinkling up. It's a new laugh that doesn't think anything is actually funny. His old laugh is for Ando, Hiro decides, and if Ando is gone then he won't use it. Not until Ando is back again.

He's going to fix this. He knows he tried with Charlie, and failed, but it's going to be different this time, because he loved Charlie for maybe half an hour, and then a week or so, but Ando is his best friend, and when he gets him back maybe more. He's loved Ando since some time between when Ando rescued him in the first week of work and when Ando rescued him from sex with a bleached-blond girl in a karaoke bar, and Hiro is going to get him back.

He can fix this. He just needs time. And time is the one thing Hiro Nakamura will always have in abundance.


End file.
